Have you read The Probabilistic Method by Joel Spencer and Noga Alon?
Although originally developed by Erdos, here's an example of the probabilistic method taken from combinatoricist Po-Shen Loh:
$A_1, dots, A_s subseteq { 1, 2, dots, M }$ such that $A_i not subset A_j$ and let $a_i = |A_i|$. Show that $$ sum_{i=1}^s frac{1}{binom{M}{a_i}} leq 1$$
The hint is to consider a random permutation $sigma = (sigma_1, dots, sigma_M)$. Loh defines the event $E_i$ when ${ sigma_1, dots, sigma_{a_i}} = A_i$. Then he observes the events $E_i$ are mutually exclusive and that $mathbb{P}(E_i)$ is relevant to our problem...
There are probably a lot of olympiad combinatorics problems that can be solved this way. Err... you were asking for number theory, but you will find both in Spencer and Alon's book.
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